ABSTRACT
Freud’s thinking about how analysis cures and the aims of therapeutic action underwent significant revisions throughout his life. The very notion of “cure” as an aim of psychoanalysis has been evolving, resting mainly on a medical model’s conception of an end-state, conveyed as both a noun and verb, which analysts have defined in various ways in accordance with the prevailing state of analytic knowledge and clinical theory. Initially, drawing on his experience with Martin Charcot at La Salpêtrière, Freud experimented with the use of suggestion in his own clinical practice—a process that entailed authoritatively counter-suggesting away the pathogenic idea that was thought to be at the heart of the patient’s symptom. Freud became interested in dreams, much as with hypnosis, for what they might reveal about how the mind works and for the clues they might provide as to the contents of the unconscious. By the 1930s, a wide-ranging debate was well underway concerning the primary mutative factors in psychoanalysis.
